Okay to Laugh? Trauma, Memoir, and Teaching the Podcast Mum Says My Memoir Is a Lie

Abstract

In her 2017 podcast Mum Says My Memoir Is a Lie, the author and comedian Rosie Waterland reads aloud her bestselling memoir, The Anti-Cool Girl (2015), chapter by chapter to her mother. As Rosie reads and her mother responds, the podcast mimics and destabilizes some of the more persistent critiques that have attended memoirs of traumatic childhood. This essay discusses the authors’ experience teaching Waterland’s podcast as a set text in an undergraduate course on contemporary life writing. Waterland’s account of a traumatic childhood fits to the dominant tropes of trauma text or misery lit that have been used to describe (mostly pejoratively) life narrative in the twenty-first century. However, as a humorous memoir, the podcast also works with affective registers and comic strategies that are designed to unsettle or disarm reader expectations and heighten critical literacy. In discussing teaching Mum Says My Memoir Is a Lie, the authors address foundational scholarly issues of truth, memory, ethics, and authenticity. As a podcast, the text also draws attention to medium and mediation, which are central. The act of listening places the student in a subject position that is inhabited in the podcast by Rosie’s mother, Lisa. What ethics of listening, or questions of responsibility in the face of trauma and testimony, might be framed here? And how might the podcast be a significant or unique medium for this kind of engagement?

Keywords:

• Rosie Waterland
• podcast
• memoir
• comedy
• trauma

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 During the podcast, Lisa does not explicitly say that any of her daughter’s recollections in the memoir are “lies.” She does often dispute Waterland’s memories but does not discredit them or the memoir generally. For example, in chapter six, Lisa admits that “all in all, it’s fairly accurate.”

2 Lindgren, “Personal Narrative Journalism,” 24.

3 Whitlock and Douglas use the term trauma text in their 2009 anthology of scholarship on life narrative and the representation of trauma in the twenty-first century, while misery lit is a general popular term, particularly in mainstream media, and even has a Wikipedia entry.

4 See, for example, Loreck’s “Pleasurable Critiques” for a discussion of how works of satire and humor, including Waterland’s Bachelor recaps, are used by feminists to enact critical mastery over problematic popular-culture representations of women’s lives and experience.

5 For example, autobiographies of childhood were a very popular subgenre of life writing during the late 1990s and early 2000s. These texts were also routinely put under the microscope in terms of their veracity, and some were discredited. Such critiques relied largely on the perceived fragility of traumatic memory, particular when it comes to childhood memories.

6 For a longer discussion of this approach, see Cardell and Douglas, “Why Literature Students.”

7 Whitlock and Douglas, Trauma Texts; Gilmore, The Limits of Autobiography and Tainted Witness; McDermott, “You Gotta Laugh.”

8 For example, in On Humour, Critchley observes that laughter is essentially a bodily experience: “the joke invites a corporeal response, from a chuckle, through to a giggle to a guffaw” (7). Distinguished from “the smile,” laughter is the “interruption of breath” and, “as a bodily phenomenon, laughter invites comparison between similarly convulsive phenomena, like orgasm and weeping … laughing violently, I lose self-control in a way that is akin” (8).

9 Fulmer and Makepeace, “‘It’s Okay to Laugh,’” 41.

10 Bond, “Black Comedy.”

11 Black Comedy.

12 Bond, “Black Comedy.” Fulmer and Makepeace discuss how best to manage racial humor in the classroom. Students should be supported to “delineate between critical race comedy versus overtly racist comedy and the gray areas in between” (“‘It’s Okay to Laugh,’” 38). As McDermott explains, “Race comedy, usually produced by marginalized artists, presents stereotypes in the context of comic strategies of inversion or absurdism to highlight the hypocrisies and illogic of racial stereotypes (also called ‘punching up’)” (“You Gotta Laugh,” 345).

13 McDermott’s article on teaching critical thinking via comedy, “You Gotta Laugh,” is an excellent example of this. McDermott’s teaching context is English Literature, and she argues that such a course offers an opportunity to show what the discipline of English can do in terms of addressing real-world problems. Further, as Ellingson notes in “Pedagogy of Laughter,” humor is an effective pedagogical tool because it opens up communication between students and heightens classroom energy.

14 McDermott, “You Gotta Laugh,” 340.

15 McDermott, “You Gotta Laugh,” 341.

16 McDermott, “You Gotta Laugh,” 346.

17 Douglas, Contesting Childhood.

18 Cardell and Kuttainen, “The Ethics of Laughter,” 106.

19 Waterland was in her late twenties when she wrote the memoir. The students often suggested that they could relate to her humor and experiences.

20 Waterland, Mum Says.

21 To quote the title of Couser’s book, Vulnerable Subjects.

22 Waterland, Mum Says.

23 Waterland, Mum Says.

24 Waterland, Mum Says.

25 It is important to note here that of the 140 students in the subject, most were aged in their early twenties. Those who did offer sympathy toward Stevens tended to be mature female students who contextualized their response within their own experiences of motherhood while still remembering their own experiences as daughters. Waterland also identifies herself frequently, sometimes ironically, as a millennial, a demographic category that aligns broadly to the majority of our students.

26 Lindgren, “Personal Narrative Journalism,” 24.

27 Waterland, Mum Says.

28 Krefting, “Hannah Gadsby.”

29 In Australia, where sex work is now decriminalized and unionized in almost all states, it is expected that Rosie would not perceive her joke to be as offensive as her mother finds it based on their age differences and different contexts growing up. Further, in Australia, legislation has replaced previously used terms with sex work and sex worker, and these terms are common in public discourse.